1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for sending and receiving files. In particular, the present invention relates to systems and methods for sending and receiving both electronic mails (emails) and files, and providing an integrated user interface for accessing email and files.
2. Description of the Background Art
Email and the web have flourished in the last decade and reached almost a billion users worldwide. In fact, these technologies have become a primary communication channel for many people. Over the last few years, email and web have substituted for regular mail as the official channel for many business, financial, and government communications and transactions. Even though email and the web have been widely used, these aging technologies have a number of limitations and problems. In particular, there are several problems with current email and web systems.
One problem in current email and web systems is the existence of multiple accounts and passwords. The creation of a web account, whether for a personal or corporate account, involves the definition of username, password and properties meant to identify the user. The result is that people end up with an unbounded list of usernames and passwords that are time consuming to manage, hard to remember, and cannot be recorded. Every computer or internet user knows that to have accounts on multiple systems and services, user must: have multiple different login names; be subject to different password rules; change passwords often according to system requirements, and not record or share a password. These restrictions coupled with multiple accounts results in additional problems including difficulty in remembering usernames and passwords, coping with repetitive, lengthy, and sometimes buggy account creation forms, dealing with complicated or lengthy password re-requests or re-activations, requirements for expensive system administration and security staff, and evaded or ineffective security when users are frustrated with security systems.
Another problem with email systems is the attachments used within the email systems. Most internet users and business services commonly attach files to emails, or create very large HTML messages. The attachments may result in email sizes that are orders of magnitude larger than a text email message. Email technology was originally intended only for short text messages. Attachments were not originally intended in the design of email systems and cause the problems because email servers have a low byte size limit compared to the file sizes that people today consider normal to communicate, each email server has different limitations on email and attachment sizes, and users' email boxes (POP) have limited storage capacity that can be exceeded by incoming messages.
As a result, emails may be bounced back to senders. In addition, the senders may not know whether a message is receivable at a destination email address before the email is actually sent making email unreliable for sending attachments. Some of the problems experienced by email users due to mailbox sizes and similar email limitations, include: unpredictable time to retrieve emails on slow connections, email bounces back (both at receiving and sending server), cluttered email client files that become corrupted, and replication of files between the PC file system and the email system. Furthermore, there are problems experienced by ISPs and corporations handling emails such as mail servers processing large emails that the users may not read, large emails bounce back and double file transfer costs, and missed communications occur and cause inefficiency and potential lost business.
File transfers of information across the web also include a number of problems. Some of the problems relate to web file uploading, links, and permissions. The web is an ideal place to post information, whether in the form or web pages or files. However, it continues to be very difficult to use personal web sites to do simple things like publishing information, notifying desired recipients, and providing them with web links.
While accessing attachments from a web site may be relatively easy, the process to setup restricted access on a personal web space is cumbersome and complicated, and beyond the ability of most users. First, the user must control the web space from which the attachments are downloadable. Second, the user must often do the following: manually upload the file to a web space, identify the correct URL for the file, copy the URL for the file into an email, set up a restricted web directory (.htaccess), place the files to be transferred in the web directory, create a password, and provide the password to the recipient. In addition, users do not have an easy way to upload files that are restricted to a user determined list of people. Portal accounts enable users to create directories to be shared with a list of other people. However, the restricted file sharing is done by directory of files and groups of people. The recipients generally need to have or create an account on that service (for instance, Yahoo Briefcase). Therefore, users who want to determine a limited list of people that can access a file on the web need to: make sure that the intended people have an account on the storage system, set up the list as a group of account IDs, set up a directory accessible to the group, and place a file in such directory. All of this is enormously cumbersome and limitative, and hinders people from sharing files. In other words, it is hard for an expert user to set file permissions for a selected list of people, and virtually impossible for the layman user.
Another problem related to web transfers of data is restrictive corporate intranets. Corporations have invested significantly over the last decade to deploy corporate intranets and file servers within the company's firewalls. This has been useful to define the boundaries of corporate information and sharing. However, employees normally have to communicate with external entities: therefore, corporations had to develop more costly features to enable restricted access and functionality to external customers and suppliers. In addition, corporate intranets need system administrators to enact special access requirements determined by employees' business and communication needs. This has resulted in additional IT development cost for low benefit. Technological constraints have been placed before business constraints, while complicating and slowing down information flow.
Because corporate intranets place a layer of system administration between people and information, employees avoid the boundaries of corporate intranets or email systems and often use other mechanisms for communication such as using email to exchange files that the intranet would disallow, using personal email accounts to conduct corporation business, using external free web file spaces (Xdrive, Yahoo, etc.), and using USB or flash memory cards to transfer files from laptop to laptop, thus evading any predefined control on file systems. The result of this flawed conception and implementation of corporate IT is that businesses deploy very costly intranet infrastructure and operations in the name of security, but this produces a work force that constantly evades the system because they cannot get certain jobs done.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and methods for an integrated mail and file transfer system.